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Programmers' Day
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoAnyone tell me what I'm meant to do on Programmers Day or why it even exists?
- MarkPNeyer 15y agosolve an np complete problem in your head!
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoPah, real programmers are doing that every day.
- hugh3 15y agoEasy, for sufficiently small problem size!
- simonsarris 15y agoWe can all do this! Given { −2, −3, 4, 13, −1}, is there a non-empty subset of the numbers that sums to zero?
- atomicdog 15y agoWhat are you supposed to do on "Martin Luther King" day?
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoI (stay in bed and) have a dream. That's different, you're remembering a specific person and what they did. I don't need to remember programmers, I am one and I work with them every day. It just feels to me like harking after gratitude but the reality is that there are loads of people who do useful, important jobs and who get on with it day after day with no more than the usual acknowledgement. If you do this where do you stop? Firemen day? Doctors day? Sewage workers day? If you're a programmer, you don't need a special day to think about programmers, if you're not a programmer, then programmers are just one of hundreds of useful trades you should be thankful for, but I see no reason why we're special.
- Tomek_ 15y agoThe origin of PD comes from Russia and AFAIK they have this tradition (inherited from the times of communism) there to celebrate professions with a special day dedicated to them, so yes, they do have firemen day, miner day or policemen day.
- kuroir 15y agoHappy Programmers' Day! On this day I'll do what I love the most: code!
- ramki 15y agoToday is dedicated to all brave souls who dared to be a programmer...!!
- iwwr 15y agoUntangling code none dared untangle before.
- dragonquest 15y agoNot to forget, created tangled code to untangle later.
- hollerith 15y agoAny Russians want to tell us whether this holiday has any meaning to the ordinary Russians?
- themoriarty 15y agoNot much (as any other professional day - reclamation expert's day, railwayman's day, etc), but we're working on it!
- xentronium 15y ago> Any Russians want to tell us whether this holiday has any meaning to the ordinary Russians? No. [UPD]: Disambiguation: this holiday has no meaning to the ordinary Russians.
- va1en0k 15y agoI don't know. Please have this Russian comic strip http://habrastorage.org/storage1/9882fe1c/28be61de/5ec00a27/2f0fba17.png http://habrastorage.org/storage1/9882fe1c/28be61de/5ec00a27/... (Programmer is working. / Programmer is celebrating the programmers' day)
- guard-of-terra 15y agoJust to clarify: it's an official Programmer's Day today in Russia, but it's not a day off. There are all kinds of X's Day-s for many values of X there.
- spiralganglion 15y agoI can't wait to see the Google Doodle for this.
- BillSaysThis 15y agoNo Doodle for you, get back to your BDD lean cloud-backed, mobile first bootstrapped startup! Stop messing on HN or your accelerator/angel investors will take away your shiny new MacBook Air.
- rkalla 15y agoWell happy PD to everybody. Today just happened to be an unexpectedly productive programming day... I guess I was "celebrating" without realizing it :)
- alexanderb 15y agoHappy PD, dear colleagues!
- TeMPOraL 15y agoComrades? ^^.
- SkippyZA 15y agoHappy Programmers' Day. I mentioned it to our Directors yesterday. Hoping we get cake at least.
- pestaa 15y agoToday is the day I must hunt down that irritating segfault, then!
- pestaa 15y agoI should add that 10 minutes later I got rid of that specific segfault I spent nights on! Wish you all the same luck.
- thebootstrapper 15y agoGreat day to quote from Dijkstra's good old article. At that time(1957) programming was not considered as a profession! Extract from Humble Programmer[1] "..in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And, believe it or not, but under the heading "profession" my marriage act shows the ridiculous entry "theoretical physicist"!.." [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....
- spiralganglion 15y agoWhat a quote! I would have opted for exterminator — a satisfactorily legitimate profession, and a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek for those who know what is really meant. As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. Of course, this was a bit before our meaning of "bug" became common knowledge, so it always got a good laugh. I'm thrilled to have followed my childhood dream to be a part of this wonderful industry of err exterminators. Happy PD everybody!
- TeMPOraL 15y ago> As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. You should have joined the Mobile Infantry. They're doing their part in killing bugs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7-PQIuWwLo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7-PQIuWwLo (yes, when people mention killing bugs, I do Starship Troopers jokes ;)).
- hristov 15y agoHe probably would not have chosen that. Another piece of Dijkstra lore is that he really hated the term "bug". He said that by using this term the programmer tried to avoid his responsibility for making correct programs by suggesting that errors somehow creep into your program out of their own volition through no fault of the programmer. Dijkstra was really hard core in terms of correctness. He insisted that each programmer had to work out a mathematical proof that his program will always provide correct output for every single possible input, and submit that proof when submitting the program. Things did not work out that way.
- Derbasti 15y agoOK then, let's solve that compile issue today then.
- AngryParsley 15y agoDegrees in computer science and computer engineering are in the top 10 for average earnings. We get to build all kinds of cool stuff used by people around the world. For many of us, programming is fun. And we get paid to do it! Every day is programmer's day.
- spiralganglion 15y agoSome interesting data I pulled together today: Approximate revenue-per-employee. Data from Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia. Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee. Facebook makes $1,500,000. Google makes $1,000,000. Microsoft makes $800,000. Sony makes $500,000. Kraft makes $400,000. Walmart makes $200,000. McDonalds makes $60,000. Now, if only there was a good source of users-per-engineer. I read that Facebook is somewhere around 1,260,000. That's just awesome. We create so much value, and for so many people.
- va1en0k 15y agoI hope you mean users-per-engineer. :-) Oh, seems that Facebook makes 1.2 dollars per user from your numbers
- spiralganglion 15y agoThanks for the correction. As for Facebook's revenue-per-user based on revenue-per-employee and number of users, you'll need the number of employees (not just engineers). That's about 2000, which works out to $4 per user. This is exactly inline with what was documented in this nifty chart: http://wallstcheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/chart-of-the-day-revenue-per-unique-visitor-google-facebook-ebay-jan-2011.jpg http://wallstcheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/chart... Amazon is kicking ass. Apple only makes $150 revenue per iOS user (Asymco).
- va1en0k 15y agoWow, amazon really does kick ass. I think saving money on designers can be justified, after all ;-)
- wlievens 15y agoHappy Programmer's Day guys and gals!
- TomVolpe 15y agoHappy Programmers' Day! Keep on hacking!
- brain5ide 15y agoI'm ashamed. Came to work after lunch and just then got told it's today. Why didn't I read HN in the morning? Now have to figure out a way to make a hack in the office to awww everybody.
- atomicdog 15y agoCan you imagine "programmer's day" being officially recognized in a western society such as the US or the UK? Over here, intellectual pursuits such as programming are effectively spat upon.
- hugh3 15y ago"Effectively spat upon", really? The reason Programmer's Day will never be a thing here is that programming is a low-risk, well-paid, white-collar professional occupation like many others. Nothing special about it, and we don't have a lawyer's day or an actuary's day or a guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms day.
- brider 15y agoThat's not the best argument. We have System Administrator's appreciation day and Administrative Professionals day here in the USA.
- jisaacstone 15y agoI, for one, am all for a "guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms" day. No seriously, manufacturing engineers need more recognition, and don't even belong on the same list as lawyers. More children need to know that "building machines" is a viable career choice. I wish I had known . . . [/rant]
- rikthevik 15y agoI agree. It's fascinating to take pretty much any device on your desk, and think, "How would I build a machine / process to build 10,000 of these a day?" Manufacturing engineering is something I have a great deal of respect for. Lots of hard problems, infinitely changing constraints, many challenges - and then marketing fucks it all up. :)
- mathattack 15y agoLet's just be practical and all take today off!
- cgarvey 15y ago"...the color white was chosen because it represents a hex number with the largest value in a 24-bit red green blue (RGB) color space: 0xFFFFFF, so programmers worldwide wear white in celebration." Only Programmers would have a holiday in which we wear white after labor day to celebrate.
- hugh3 15y agoJust remember to take a spare shirt, for after you spill your breakfast burrito on the first one.
- hugh3 15y agoJust remember to take a spare shirt, for after you spill your breakfast burrito on the first one.
- philwelch 15y agoRussian Labor Day is May 1.
- drcube 15y agoBeing the 256th day, why wouldn't they choose the color 0x000100? Green's my favorite color.
- Killah911 15y agoWishing all programmers Manÿ Happÿ Returns of the Daÿ and Maÿ each one of those Returns compile successfullÿ ÿ : 256th ascii character (should henceforth be the Programmers' day symbol) correction: Extended ASCII character per http://www.ascii-code.com/ http://www.ascii-code.com/
- ysangkok 15y agoThere are only 128 ASCII characters.
- Killah911 15y agoYou're right, I should have said Extended ASCII
- MichaelGG 15y agoExtended ASCII isn't a proper term either. ASCII is 7-bits, that's all. There's no 8-bit extension to ASCII. Extended ASCII is really more like "some 8-bit encoding that shares the first 127 values with ASCII" -- and there are plenty of such encodings.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoOn Easter we hunt for eggs. On Halloween we dress in costumes. On Festivus we air grievances and perform feats of strength. On Programmer's Day? We argue about the naming of things! (Though we have to figure out how to turn it into a drinking game.)
- unwind 15y agoNit-pick: that's not an ASCII character at all, since ASCII is a 7-bit encoding it does not contain a code point with the value 255 (or 256). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%B8#Character_encodings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%B8#Character_encodings.
- 15y ago
- phatbyte 15y agoHappy Programmer's Day. Wish you a full day of coding with no bugs :P
- MattGrommes 15y agoIf you don't have any bugs, how do you know your code is working correctly? I personally never trust code that works on the first try. :)
- phatbyte 15y agoYou should try writing some unit tests then :P
- adambyrtek 15y agoLooks like my birthday is on Programmers' Day, nice.
- forther 15y ago256 can NOT be represented with 8 bits
- spiralganglion 15y agoThat's the number of distinct values you get with 8 bits. Since there is no "zeroth" day of the year, it makes sense to have it on the 256th day instead of the 255th.
- forther 15y agoyep. I just commented on exact wiki words.
- ycatvfan 15y agoI did not know this, otherwise I could have taken the day off.